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Rewind six months and you’ll find a Brooklyn Nets organization that was in absolute tatters.
Kevin Durant had requested a trade. Kyrie Irving had not yet opted-in to the finals year of his max contract. Ben Simmons was the butt of every joke around the league, and nobody seemed to have any respect for head coach Steve Nash.
Fast forward to the present and the Nets are currently among the hottest teams in the NBA and are just one game behind the Boston Celtics in the loss column for top spot in the Eastern Conference.
Now, it hasn’t always been the smoothest path. The Nets fired Nash just one month into the season. And Irving was suspended for refusing to apologize for his rampant antisemitism. But that’s now in the past and on the court, Brooklyn looks like a well-oiled machine.
How did they get there? In part by Kevin Durant returning to his perch as one of the league’s most dominant players. Durant recently explained how he did that and how the Nets got refocused and back on the path to an NBA title.
Kevin Durant Says That Togetherness Is What Kept Nets From Crumbling
Durant recently sat down with ESPN’s Nick Friedell to discuss his team’s turnaround. He says that the team’s togetherness is why they didn’t completely buckle under the offseason chaos.
Because we was together regardless. I think coming into the training camp, we understood that it’s going to be a lot on us from a media standpoint, from just the noise in general around our team, so I think that made us tighter once camp started.
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We started to win some games, started to get better as a team, and do some things out there that work for us. And now it seems like everything was patched all together, but it felt like it was always cool, to be honest.
Durant may well have a point. Winning fixes and all and Brooklyn is doing plenty of that these days. But it would’ve been just as easy for the Nets to bottom out. Durant and Irving could have asked out again at the trade deadline. Instead, Brooklyn is beginning to look like a true title contender. One that nobody saw coming just a handful of months ago.